By
starting with the earliest evidence for written administration in post-Roman
Britain, we plunge immediately into some confusion in terminology. The
terms charter
and writ theoretically
have a somewhat different meaning, a charter being a grant or privilege
bestowed by authority, while a writ is a command or instruction issued
by authority. However, there is such as thing as a written command, sent
out to those in authority in a local region, to respect a grant or privilege
bestowed by central authority. In the later middle ages, the evolution
of administrative functions caused the development of two different kinds
of documents, but in their earliest form, documents from the king could
have certain characteristics of a charter or a writ.

There
are also conventions about how the terms are used. The word charter is
sometimes used in a very loose sense to mean any kind of legal document,
including business agreements, wills or just about anything else. The
term diploma can
be used to specify a royal grant or privilege, that is to say, a royal
charter. However, there are some differences in form between diplomas
as used on the continent of Europe and those which developed in Anglo-Saxon
England. One particularly English form of the two types of royal document
known in the period is sometimes called a writ, even when it is a charter
or diploma. I hope that is all perfectly clear, but if it isn't, it may
become so as we proceed.

The
terminology of Anglo-Saxon charters has nearly as many convolutions as this
carved Anglo-Saxon cross in the church of Brompton-in-Allertonshire, Yorkshire.

There
is a significant corpus of these documents, certainly enough to infer
that the literate mode of issuing instructions and granting royal favours
was well established in England before the Norman Conquest. However, only
a small fraction of the documents exists in authentic, original, single
sheet form. The rest are known from later copies in cartularies
or have been copied by later antiquarians from lost originals. Many, even
of the single sheets, have been proven to be forgeries. In the absence
of any chancery
records from this period, a detailed interpretation of how the system
worked in practice may be a little tricky. But history is not for the
fainthearted.

The
earliest charters were in Latin and started appearing around the 7th century
under the names of the regional leaders who styled themselves kings of
small domains such as Mercia or Kent. Later, under the kings of a united
England, the documents proliferated. However, there is no real evidence
for a royal chancery until around the time of Edward the Confessor in
the mid 11th century. The earlier charters were probably penned in monastic
scriptoria,
sometimes even in the monasteries which were the beneficiaries of the
lands or privileges being granted.

These
Latin royal charters, or diplomas, were detailed documents of imposing
style. They were recorded on a single sheet of parchment.
They began with a cross and a long and florid introduction. They included
a date entered in a verbose format, or sometimes several as the year might
be given numerically as well as in relation to the regnal year of the
monarch. In the case of a land grant, details of the grant and the boundaries
of the land were entered in the vernacular
with great accuracy. This was followed by a curse against violators of
the grant. The names of the grantor and all the witnesses were then entered,
each beside a sign of the cross.

Although
the form of these documents supposedly initially derived from that of
private deeds of
the Roman era, there was a certain difference in concept. The Anglo-Saxon
documents were produced, not by a society which valued the legal significance
of the written word as such, but which placed its faith in witnessed oral
testimony. These charters bore none of the validating insignia of the
Roman documents from which they derived; no autograph signatures, no notarial
insignia, no seal.
Nevertheless, they became regarded as legal title deeds to land, even
after the witnesses required to validate them were dead and gone.

The first two lines of a charter of King Coenwulf of Mercia from 812 AD. (From
Wright 1879)

The above sample is from
a long document recording a grant of land to Wulfred, archbishop. You can
see the sign of the cross at the beginning and then an invocation to the deity
In nomine dei summi regis aeterni. This is followed
by the date in Roman numerals and then sweeps along into the year of the gloriosissimi reign of the king. The sanctions clause indicates that anyone acting against
these provisions will be subject to Christ's justice, the ultimate real estate
tribunal. The names of the grantor, the grantee and six witnesses are entered
against crosses.

During
the reign of Alfred the Great, in the late 9th century, there was something
of a move towards vernacular literacy. Great works were translated from
Latin into Old
English and this may have owed something to Englishness as an ethnic
concept in the face of invading Danes. In the 10th century, reforms to
Benedictine monasticism in England tended to restore Latin as the language
of liturgy and
the church. After the reign of the Danish king Cnut (or Canute as he was
styled in textbooks of my youth), the ruling aristocracy was engulfed
in episodes that involved rebellious sons, incontinent mothers and murderous
brothers drawn from the Danish, Anglo-Saxon and Norman camps. The reign
of Edward the Confessor saw another assertion of Englishness through the
use of vernacular language, this time in the form of legal documents.

The
shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Despite his Norman affiliations,
he apparently became the patron saint of Englishness.

A
significant number of royal charters recording grants of land or rights
to a beneficiary, which could be an institution or an individual, were
produced in the vernacular in the reign of Edward the Confessor. These
are sometimes referred to as vernacular writs. The format, or diplomatic,
of these documents is highly standardised and rather different to that
of the Latin charters. It was a new format and formed the basis for later
English royal charters. Even the physical appearance of the documents
was retained after the Norman Conquest.

It
is uncertain whether Edward the Confessor had a royal chancery as such.
The names of some royal clerks are known, apparently recruited from the
royal chaplains, but whether they actually wrote documents or acted as
the brains behind the formula is really not known. It is most likely that
monastic scribes
were still doing the actual writing work. The church was probably the sole agent of literacy in the land, and a close relationship between church and chancery existed right through the middle ages. The earliest surviving examples
of the great seal
also date to this reign. This double sided wax seal was not used to seal
up the document, but to authenticate it. The writ consisted of a single
sheet of parchment with two strips partially cut across the bottom. The
seal was attached to one while the other was used to tie up the folded
document. The seal dangled down from the closed document, so you knew
exactly who it was from and that you had better open it. It was probably
read aloud at a meeting of the shire court.

The
two sides of the great seal of Edward the Confessor. Unfortunately, these drawings are probably taken from a forged seal, but it looked more or less like that.

If you
are looking at this page without frames, there is more information about
medieval writing to be found by going to the home
page (framed) or the site map
(no frames).
This site
is created and maintained by Dr Dianne Tillotson,
freelance researcher and compulsive multimedia and web author. Comments are
welcome. Material on this web site is copyright, but some parts more so than
others. Please check here for copyright status
and usage before you start making free with it. This page last modified 14/3/2005.